by James C. Sherlock
It is called defining the terms of the debate.
Sort of like naming a climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
The war to define the ground in a headline debate in Virginia is between supporters of either:
- Virginia DOE’s draft “2022 Model Policies on the Privacy, Dignity and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools;” or
- the last administration’s “Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools” that has been cancelled.
The draft VDOE document commits four secular sins at once:
- It acknowledges the rights of parents;
- It acknowledges that children are the responsibilities of their parents first and then the schools;
- It provides measures to protect all students; and, most egregiously
- It does not single out a victim class.
Mortal sins against progressivism. Every one. The horror on the left is palpable.
Only one narrative is permitted in WokeWorld — Victims and Oppressors Sorted by Identity Group.
It is projected onto everything.
VDOE’s draft model policies document right up front lays out the case that changes were necessary to protect transgender kids in the context of the legal rights of all.
It cites the rights granted to parents under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Code of Virginia. It cites the First Amendment in prohibiting the government from compelling speech that is contrary to an individual’s personal or religious beliefs.
It goes further:
The 2021 Model Policies promoted a specific viewpoint aimed at achieving cultural and social transformation in schools. The 2021 Model Policies also disregarded the rights of parents and ignored other legal and constitutional principles that significantly impact how schools educate students, including transgender students.
It is certainly acceptable to disagree with the administration’s policies and the legal logic behind them.
But few in the press do that. None, in fact, that I have read.
Most reports and editorials dismiss the work as “anti-transgender” without explanation, and go on to the endless consequences, including mass murder, of such policies.
Indeed, the mass murder linkage occurred to two different journalists in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on the same day.
Stories on the public comments on the proposed policies.
First, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, we got reporting this morning that ignored the administration’s policy reasoning, not even to disagree with it.
Here is what we got:
The Youngkin administration’s document would replace the K-12 transgender policies written under then-Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration last year that provided additional protections for transgender and nonbinary students.
“Provided additional protections.” So now, presumably, transgender students will be less “protected.”
Then the obligatory:
The proposed Youngkin policies were widely denounced by LGBTQ advocates and organizations, and prompted thousands of Virginia students across the state to walk out of school on Sept. 27 in protest.
Apparently not a single Virginian that the RTD knows — or can imagine — applauded the Youngkin policies.
Second, Fairfax Now’s headline:
Virginia still reviewing feedback on policies limiting transgender student rights.
Nice touch. “Limiting rights”.
- First, “model policies” can neither grant nor limit rights;
- Second, and un-noted by the author, the Youngkin administration contends that it
supports efforts to protect and encourage respect for all students. Thus, we have a collective responsibility to address topics such as the treatment of transgender students with necessary compassion and respect for all students.
The shooting in Colorado.
First, an RTD article: “Equality Virginia urges Youngkin to repeal transgender policies in light of Colo. shooting.”
And then, an RTD Op-Ed: “Williams: Now is no time to feed anti-LGBTQ bigotry. The Youngkin administration needs to rescind its proposed transgender policies.”
An inconvenient fact: last week, attorneys for the accused shooter informed the court that their client identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.
Yet this week two journalists were careful not to mention the fact that “they” shot other members of the LGBTQIA+ community in that tragedy.
Neither mentions that the killer came from a dysfunctional home. That, too, would interrupt the narrative. Parents come in all colors and political views. Not an identity group.
An op-ed in the New York Post came far closer to the truth than the scribes above. The author noted, among other issues:
- Failed parenting produces failed youth; and
- Single-parent households, of which by percentage the United States leads (if that is the correct term) the world, are likely to produce dysfunctional kids.
The terrific Megan McArdle, who accompanies George Will as a Washington Post conservative commentator, made similar observations.
Neither found a link between a Colorado nightclub shooter and Virginia school policy. Clearly they did not dig deeply enough.
Bottom line. Media are constitutionally protected as the watchdogs of government to protect citizen freedom.
As long as vast swaths of the media are unwilling to tell both sides of a story, or even has a “narrative,” we will never be able to come together as a nation.
I honestly am not sure why those who disagree with the constitutional and legal logic presented by the Youngkin administration in support of its revised “model policies” do not dispute those contentions rather than ignore them. Perhaps someone can explain that to me.
I also am not sure why journalists and “groups” like whatever “Equality Virginia” is use a shooting in a Colorado night club to attack proposed school policies in Virginia.
Indeed, the whole fact set in Colorado appears to support policies treating everyone equally and with respect rather than singling them out by group. But it wasn’t the Governor’s side that brought it up.
Perhaps parental and school lessons and examples in simple morality are a big part of the answer to both mass shootings and good manners in school.
But the left deems morality an oppressor construct. Like manners.
Unfortunately, I see no light at the end of that tunnel. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, progressive journalists gotta ignore facts when they are inconvenient to the narrative.
Progressive journalists number 95% of the profession. They have a story — and only one story. They tell it daily and connect it to everything.
There are no complex stories of equally complex individual humans with individual virtues and sins, achievements and disappointments.
Progressives know who is who among oppressors and victims, and are happy, driven really, to identify each.
Endlessly.
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